Kmflett's Blog

The pub in 2025. The biggest selling food and drink items in Wetherspoons

Wetherspoons has around 800 pubs in the UK and Ireland and its CEO Tim Martin is well known for his public pronouncements & ‘interesting’ views.

He recently opined about the largest selling food and drink items in Spoons. Given the controversy over the decision to stop selling steaks and put beans in ramekins it may surprise.

Food wise breakfasts are the biggest selling food items (most pubs don’t open for breakfast- Spoons are competing with cafes, Prets etc). The biggest selling item in that context is tea and toast.

Drinks wise draught Pepsi outsells everything else but bottomless coffee outsells Pepsi

An interesting perspective on the pub in 2025

On a visit to Lancashire King Charlie visited Butlers cheese & opined that he liked sheep’s cheese on a digestive biscuit which he claimed is his favourite snack. Predictably this has started Times letter writers off. Suggestions(so far) include peanut butter & tomato ketchup, peanut butter with mayo on toast, a dark chocolate biscuit spread with primula cheese.

HRH’s taste in snacks appears quite conservative by contrast, perhaps unsurprisingly. No mention of course of the ultimate proletarian snack, a pickled egg in a bag of crisps

No King in the US & the UK linked by Tom Paine

There have been events to mark the 250th anniversary of the US’s declaration of independence on 4th July. Meanwhile true to form Donald Trump held his own event.

A founding point of the US Constitution in 1776 was the principle of republicanism, breaking from the British system of monarchy. It remains a matter of historical debate but one influence on that was Tom Paine’s Common Sense. Paine born in Thetford in 1737 had landed in America in 1774 and his political writings were influential.

He later went on to become an important figure in the French Revolution from 1792 with his best known work the Rights of Man.

Paine was prosecuted in his absence in the UK but his ideas were also influential in the country of his birth.

E P Thompson notes in the Making of the English Working Class (1963) radical activity in Bernard (Barnard) Castle in Durham

In the autumn and winter of 1792 Wilberforce the MP for Yorskhire (in the pre-1832 Unreformed Parliament’ was advised of the disposition of the lower people in the County of Durham’

Considerable numbers in Bernard Castle have manifested disaffection to the constitution and the words ‘No King’ ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’ have been written upon the Market Cross. During the late disturbances amongst the keelmen  at Shields and Sunderland, General Lambton was thus addressed, ‘Have you read this little work of Tom Paine’s? ‘No’ ‘Then read it- we like it much. You have a great estate General; we shall soon divide it amongst us’

Has ashen faced Neasden FC Supremo Ron Knee finally retired? (Barry Fantoni 1940-2025)

Barry Fantoni who died in late May spent 46 years at Private Eye retiring in 2010.

One of his regular features was Neasden FC, whose ashen faced manager Ron Knee was perpetually aged 59.

Neasden FC first lost all their games in the North Circular Relegation League (as they did every season) in 1970 cheered on by their fans Sid and Doris Bonkers and helped by key players such as Baldy Pevsner.

Knee’s legendary football management reputation often saw him reported as being a candidate for plum Managerial jobs elsewhere. However now he has been passed over for both England and Spurs manager the question must be asked. Is Ron Knee retiring?

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys & Radical Politics

Brian Wilson who has died at 82 is best known for being a central part of the Beach Boys who produced such sublime music as Good Vibrations in the 1960s.

But there is a lot more to the story of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys including an early 1970s turn to radical politics.

In the sixties the clean shaven, youthful and smartly dressed Beach Boys appealed to what might be characterised as an ‘All-American’ constituency. The one Donald Trump might have been vaguely thinking of when he paid tribute to Brian Wilson this week.

Yet the 1960s was the time of US involvement in the Vietnam War. Clean cut fans of the Beach Boys were being despatched to the front line and finding themselves killed and injured. A powerful anti-war movement grew as part of a wider left.

The Beach Boys ditched their surfing image and produced one of the classic albums, Surfs Up (1971)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf%27s_Up_(album)

The opening track, poignant in relation to their past, was Don’t go near the water. A song that has only grown in relevance in the intervening 54 years. Brian Wilson played a part in the production of Surfs Up and deserves to be remembered for that as well as of course Good Vibrations

Don’t go near the water
Don’t you think it’s sad
What’s happened to the water
Our water’s going bad
Oceans, rivers, lakes and streams
Have all been touched by man
The poison floating out to sea
Now threatens life on land

Don’t go near the water
Ain’t it sad
What’s happened to the water
It’s going bad

Don’t go near the water
Don’t go near the water

Toothpaste and soap will make our oceans a bubble bath
So let’s avoid an ecological aftermath
Beginning with me
Beginning with you

Don’t go near the water
To do it any wrong
To be cool with the water
Is the message of this song

Let’s all help the water
Right away
Do what we can and ought to
Let’s start today

The Media, Reform & Ephology

Private Eye 1651

The above satirises the result of the recent Hamilton By-Election where Reform came a good third. Of course in first past the post elections there is only winner, the candidate who comes first. That did not stop the BBC news site from posting an article stating that ‘another winner’ was Reform.

Nigel Farage holds the record for the most appearances on BBC Question Time, and recently a BBC memo has surfaced which examines how more Reform supporters can be attracted to the BBC.

None of this is particularly new. The historian and new left activist E P Thompson wrote as long as 1959 about where Psephology- an analysis of election voting- became Ephology, where it morphed from reporting opinion to trying to mould opinion.

There must be a note of caution. Reform is not just a media bubble with a right wing media looking for an an alternative opposition to a failing Tory Party. Reform is feeding off real grassroots discontent and generalising it to the right, around racism and small boats. The task facing the left is to generalise that discontent not against the have nots but against the haves. That task wont be led by Labour in Parliament. It needs to come from below in workplaces and communities.

Still Private Eye makes a good point

Michael Rosen’s poem remains a powerful warning not to normalise racism & far right politics

Fascism: I sometimes fear…

I sometimes fear that

people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress

worn by grotesques and monsters

as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.

Fascism arrives as your friend.

It will restore your honour,

make you feel proud,

protect your house,

give you a job,

clean up the neighbourhood,

remind you of how great you once were,

clear out the venal and the corrupt,

remove anything you feel is unlike you…

It doesn’t walk in saying,

“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”

Michael Rosen

So, Farewell then, E J Thribb

I note with sadness that

Barry Fantoni has died at 85,

He also wrote poetry

Using the name E J Thribb

Thribb was for ever 17.5

But age caught up with Fantoni

In the end

KM Flett, aged 68 & a bit